SmartDeploy Enterprise 1940 - Released!

For SmartDeploy Enterprise version 1940 we have release a few new features as well as addressed a few customer bugs. Please see the lists below for further information on both.

Features

Build Wizard: The Build Wizard is a new application that is installed with SmartDeploy Enterprise to aid in the creation of a virtual reference machine. Build Wizard can create a VM for VMware Workstation and Player, Windows Virtual PC and Oracle Virtual Box and apply custom settings. The Build Wizard is a Silverlight application that requires a new prerequisite check during SmartDeploy Enterprise installation. We now require that the technician computer have both Silverlight and .Net 4.0 installed prior to installing SmartDeploy Enterprise. If these prerequisites are not met the installer will try to automatically install them. Microsoft does not support .Net 4.0 installation to Windows XP SP2 and below, causing us to adopt this requirement as well. If the system you are installing to does not meet any of these requirements you will be prompted to make the proper changes. Overtime you will see more of SmartDeploy Enterprise transition to using a Silverlight code base making these requirements even more important.

Ability to deploy Install.wim from a Windows product DVD (Vista and higher): Previously SmartDeploy Enterprise would not create the BCD when installing images that were missing the store. This has been changed to allow for the deployment of the install.wim to speed up testing and deployment of a vanilla image to computers. Please note that when using the Install.wim from a product DVD you will need to access the Advanced options of Deploy Wizard to enable the Administrator account.

Updated SmartDeploy Enterprise boot environment (SmartPE): We have updated SmartPE to Windows PE 3.1 and included hotfix KB982018. This update will allow SmartDeploy Enterprise to make better use of advanced format disks. For more information on this update and the impact of advanced format disks please see the knowledge base article.

Added ability to capture VMware ESX virtual hard drives offline: SmartVDK (the virtual disk connection utility used by SmartDeploy Enterprise) has been updated to allow the offline capture of VMware ESX virtual hard drives. The virtual hard drive will need to be exported from the VMware ESX server prior to capture.

Fixes

Updated credential prompts: The credential prompts in SmartPE have been updated to be more straightforward. The prompts went from a 4 line to 2 line entry model.

1930 Credential Prompt

1940 Credential Prompt

More informative domain join dialog: We have updated the dialog you see when attempting to join a computer to a domain. The new text boxes contain a title stating to use the FQDN of the domain and distinguished name of the OU.

Large Platform Pack causing overflow: Under certain circumstances users would receive an overflow error when attempting to use a large Platform Pack. We have updated the Deploy Wizard to allow for more file entries in the Platform Pack to fix this issue.

%SmartDeploy_Media% causing tasks to fail: In version 1930 of SmartDeploy Enterprise a check to ensure the file being called from a pre or post image task exists was implemented. The check was not resolving the %SmartDeploy_Media% variable correctly however, causing a false positive. This has been updated to pre-resolve the variable before enacting the check.

Default file name when saving answer file: When exporting an answer file form the Deploy Wizard the name will now be automatically populated with SmartDeploy.xml.